Our Salesforce Integration Just Got Even Better: Full Content Syncing and More

We’re happy to announce some great improvements to our Salesforce integration today that make maintaining, administering, and using your integration even easier and more hassle-free than before. The new release includes improved data synchronization features, activity timestamps that allow you to drive better workflow, and more robust error handling and notifications.

This is a great follow-up to another recent release that improved the authorization setup process for the Salesforce integration (see the blog post – “Improvements to our Salesforce Integration” – for details on that release).

Improved Data Synchronization

We’ve significantly improved the way that we synchronize content from the community to your Salesforce instances. After this release, all content will be synchronized, including historical content, new content, and updated content. Previously, only new content being generated in the community was synced up to your Salesforce instance. If you accidentally turned your integration off for a period of time, for example, you would need to manually synchronize the topics that you missed during that timeframe. Now, when you turn the integration back on, all of the activity from the community will automatically be synchronized to your Salesforce instance.

Administrators will now see a handy little progress bar on the Integrations page displaying what percentage of the community’s content has successfully be synchronized to the community.

Drive Better Workflow with Activity Timestamps

You’ll now notice two additional data fields from the community that we synchronize to Salesforce that should enable you to drive better workflow with your service agents. The two fields are timestamps representing when the topic was created and when it was last modified. Previously, you were only able to view the native timestamps that Salesforce creates for the custom objects in the Get Satisfaction package. However, these new fields represent the official activity timestamps from the community (irrespective of when the data was synchronized to your Salesforce instance).

What this means is that you can now confidently drive workflows with your service agents based on these fields. For instance, you can add a view of topics that are sorted based on Last Modified Date and filtered for a particular product. A service agent can be monitoring this view to see if there is new activity that should be responded to. If one of your customers me-too’s a topic, posts a reply, or even follows a topic, the topic will be updated and it’ll rise to the top of the view, prompting an agent to take a look.

More Robust Error Handling & Notifications

When integrating two systems together, there’s always things that can go wrong — each system can periodically have planned (and unplanned) downtime where their API’s are not available, user permissions can inadvertently changed, API limits can be exceeded, or licenses can expire. These things inevitably happen. But fortunately, we’ve built a robust mechanism to handle these types of issues.

The Salesforce integration has a robust scheduling and re-try mechanism that allows us to ensure activity from your community reliably makes it over to Salesforce. You’ll be notified only when you need to take action on a failure, which is when a topic has failed to synchronize for 24 consecutive hours or when the credentials you’ve provided are no longer being accepted by the Salesforce API. The Get Satisfaction support team will also be notified of these failures and will be available to help you troubleshoot the issue.

Learn more about Get Satisfaction’s Salesforce integration

If you’re new to Get Satisfaction or want to learn more about Get Satisfaction’s integration with Salesforce, this is a great place to start: Get Satisfaction for Salesforce.